Improving Your Safety
With a Behavioral Approach
(Reprinted from Hydrocarbon Processing)

Ownership of habits

Terry E. McSween

Implementing a successful behavioral safety process requires active support and involvement from employees, management and the safety department. Using a behavioral safety process, management and employees can form observation teams that honestly review and evaluate work habits and practices. Implementing this approach to safety involves several steps such as planning meetings, kick-off meetings, observations, feedback sessions, and, finally, incentives. Checklists provide easy-to-use menus for employees to use in observing and discussing the safety of their associates’ work practices. Such observation surveys help establish ownership of safety for both employees and management. Also, the surveys provide a source of information on the level of safety in a given area. More importantly, they create an opportunity for feedback. The observers and the observed have an opportunity to discuss ‘the positives" and the areas of concern. Above all, managment must support honest and open results.

These checklists provide a ways to link employees and safety goals by putting a behavioral safety process into your organization’s present safety efforts.

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This article first appeared in Hydrocarbon Processing (August 1993) and is reproduced here with permission.